LEGAL educators at the University of the West Indies say there is an adequate supply of law professionals in the region to run the proposed Caribbean Court of Justice.

The law teachers, who noted that the regional university had produced more than 4,000 law graduates in its 30 years of existence, on Saturday expressed their impatience with the debate over the replacement of the British-based Privy Council with a regional appellate court, which they say is the next logical step.

“We have come full circle and it has boiled down to the fact that we want to set up a good court that will serve our purposes,” said Dr Leighton Jackson, deputy dean of the UWI law faculty, in summing up a three-day conference on the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). “We want the CCJ to be a major contributor to world jurisprudence,” he said.

Jackson was echoing the view of Keith Sobion, principal of the Norman Manley Law School, who told the conference at the university’s Mona Campus on the weekend that the human resources of the region was ready to assume leadership of a home-grown final appellate court.

According to Sobion, the architects of the system of indigenous legal education in the Caribbean determined that as a preparatory step it was necessary to provide the region a suitably trained human resource, a cadre of lawyers who not only understood the technical aspects of the law, but also understood it in its social context. “Over the last 30 years that cadre of lawyers can now provide that bedrock on which the court can now be firmly built,” said the law school head.

Sobion noted that the curriculum for legal education encompassed other disciplines to ensure that professionals were rounded individuals, capable of contributing to the broader development needs of the countries of the region. He also pointed to continuing efforts at reviewing the legal education curriculum to include relevant areas such as environmental and international trade laws.

Another UWI law educator, Dr Oswald Harding called for more public education on the CCJ, and rapped the government and opposition in Jamaica for taking a partisan approach in the controversial debate over establishing the regional tribunal. “A government should realise that the use of its parliamentary majority or its governmental authority may not be in the best interest of advancing a policy, but dialogue. may be more effective,” said Harding. “An opposition, as a government in waiting, should not advance policies from a point of view of a narrow issue to enhance their prospect of becoming government but for the greater good of the majority of the people.,” he added.

At the same time, Dr Trevor Munroe, professor of government at the UWI argued that the rule of law as well as political democracy was at a high level in the Anglophone Caribbean; but he suggested that the democracy would be enhanced if the people of the region were allowed to decide, through referenda, on the replacement of the Privy Council with the CCJ.

Meanwhile, noted attorney, Frank Phipps suggested that the Jamaican Parliament was not empowered to establish another legislature or a court because of prohibitive provisions contained in an obscure legislation – the West Indies Act of 1962. This was passed in the British Parliament in April of that year. “What is of profound significance is there is no provision to amend the West Indies Act,” Phipps said.

The Jamaican Constitutional Court last month threw out a case brought by the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party and local human rights/law groups to prevent the government from proceeding to enact legislation to bring the CCJ agreement into effect. The opposition said, however, that it would appeal the court’s ruling, and asked the government to delay the resumption of the debate on the CCJ legislation in the Parliament. But Attorney-General A J Nicholson said the legislative process would resume without further delay.